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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

Sure. Facebook is not a history book. It's a social network with kids on it.

Napalm girl is a powerful photo. So are photos of Aushwitz. So too are photos of trench warfare. Saddam Hussein's hanging is historically important, as are all the images of children killed in Aleppo, or drowned families washing up on shores in Italy.

That doesn't mean we need all these things on Facebook.

I'm sensitive to censorship, and Facebook is a powerful and important platform for sharing, but I'm not prepared to say every photo of historical significance must necessarily be allowed.

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Who are "we" and why "we" gets to decide what I need and don't need? I mean, when you say "Facebook is a private company and can do whatever the hell they please, including deleting random content because their left foot felt itchy this morning" - I get that. Completely. It's their service, if I like it, I post my cat pictures there, if I don't, I post them elsewhere.

But if you claim the mantle of "we" that is supposed to have special privileges on deciding who needs what on Facebook - I'd really like to know how comes you got this privilege and where it comes from. And no, "think of the kids!!!" is not a good answer.

Did you just pull a "think of the children"?

Facebook is a publishing and communications platform and if I can't use it to discuss politics or history with my list of acquaintances, then it's useless to me.

Also, in case you have children, it would be best if they didn't have FB accounts with strangers in their list. Just saying, historical photos is probably your last problem.

> It's a social network with kids on it.

What is this supposed to mean? There are adults too.

You seem to be falling into the fallacy of protecting kids by prohibiting adults from engaging in adult behavior.

> It's a social network with kids on it.

Since Facebook's entire point is that feeds are receiver-specific, "think of the children"-style arguments based on "...with kids on it" may provide a good reason for establishing controls that prevent certain content from going into the feeds of children, but has a much harder time justify preventing the content from being shared on Facebook at all.

Honestly, many of those things would maybe be okay on Facebook. The subject of this photo in particular was the controversy. From the article...

A Facebook spokeswoman said: “While we recognise that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others. We try to find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves while maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community."

> While we recognise that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others.

Just because distinguishing between mere nudity and inappropriate nudity may be difficult in some cases doesn't mean it shouldn't be done, or, moreover, that it isn't necessary to be done in order to "find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves and while maintaining a safe and respectful experience".

Incidentally, protecting people from things that they neither need nor want protection from can be at least as disrespectful as exposing them to things that they wish to avoid.

> protecting people from things that they neither need nor want protection from can be at least as disrespectful as exposing them to things that they wish to avoid.

In a setting where respite from a resource is a click-away, I think that it's always more disrespectful to "protect" people from things from which they ask not to be protected.

It's impossible to draw the line between "mere" and inappropriate nudity, a line that will satisfy all people. This is simply an instance of Facebook making a choice that is just a bit out of balance compared to what the majority thinks, but make no mistake, it's just as much of an arbitrary choice as all others.

> it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others

No it's not. 99% of photos of nude children are fine. Children are born nude. Most very young children play nude for many hours a day. They don't have, or at least the ones I know don't have, any matching sense of self-consciousness or modesty for the misguided cultural copy-paste being applied here.

If a photograph is pornographic, then someone will report it immediately, and facebook can take action.

And no matter how difficult it might be in some strange edge cases to decide whether something is "pornographic" (in reality, these cases are probably very rare), this photograph is obviously not pornographic is any sense of the word.

> Most very young children play nude for many hours a day.

Not in 'Muricia. Nude baby at beach = lifeguard called.

This. If anyone was degenerate enough to pursue the path, pedo-porn is easily available.(and these people should be rehabilitated, not denigrated or 'removed' from society entirely depending on your perspective).

When I say 'easily available' people might misconstrue the statement; so, again, it is relatively easy to acquire child porn and stay anonymous(e.g. no repercussions) if you wanted to do so.

We as society should not allow censorship on this premise; what is the underlying ideology? That once this photo is accepted mainstream people will start posting pedo-porn obfuscated as war crimes?

Spoiler: this photo has existed for quite a while and that has unsurprisingly not happened.

People are meta. You can't optimize against them in this authoritarian manner. Most humans just want the truth; hiding a child in pain from her environmental circumstances just because she's naked is not the solution and it looks orwellian.

Great job Zuck.

Well, that's easy for _you_ to say, you're not the one who gets your door kicked in and hauled off to jail and handed over to the inmates with a "he's a child molester, deal with him" if you happen to guess wrong.

What is wrong with a kid seeing that particular photo? The only truly troubling things are the expressions on the people's faces (something which would take a parent about 30 seconds to explain), and the context (which is hard to infer from the photo directly).

If your friend (on Facebook or in person) is showing you photos, saying things you find offensive, isn't your issue with your friend, not the mechanism by which they chose to do this?

Isn't that the same argument we use for things like BitTorrent?

Good news is that you can filter what you see in your feed. Why do you think you or Facebook have a say in conversations between people you have no connection with? Why are you ok with taking down that conversation because there's a disturbing image that you don't even see, because it is not in your feed?

This post is exactly why Facebook will eventually fail.

People don't want a centralized authority controlling free speech. Democracy is what's needed in this context and it's going to be messy(read:human, we're all messy).

>I'm sensitive to censorship, and Facebook is a powerful and important platform for sharing, but I'm not prepared to say every photo of historical significance must necessarily be allowed.

False. If you think 'powerful' means big enough to censor things for everyone then you are not sensitive to censorship for rational values of censorship. We all deserve reality.

What is your argument against this photo? Too 'powerful' for a child to see? Are parents no longer held responsible for their own children? Are we all considered children now?

Who shouldn't see this, and why? Explain it exactly, not with 'feel good' stupidity.

> It's a social network with kids on it.

So is reality.

Bravo! That is brilliant!

The Earth has children on it <gasp!>

I don't want to see those things either. I don't go on Facebook for some historical reality check, or to be reminded of the horrors that are happening around the world. Every news media organization sensors itself and doesn't show the full extent of the horrors it reports on b/c it counterproductive. It's upsetting and it ultimately just desensitizes you. I think that this photo has already been overused and turns into something like an art piece. If you had a similar new photo of a traumatized naked girl after, for instance, a recent school shooting in the US people could feel a lot more shocked than when they see this photo for the Nth time - and people wouldn't object to it being removed.

You have to draw a line somewhere. No naked children or gore seems reasonable.

I don't fully agree but you're making a rational argument and didn't deserve the downvotes.

>You have to draw a line somewhere. No naked children or gore seems reasonable.

You, as a user, can try to draw the line by controlling your feed, that's your responsibility. But you agreed to be exposed to other people's content when you joined the site - that's the entire point of it.

We, as a society, have no responsibility at all to "draw a line" anywhere to cater to you, and neither does Facebook (nor should it, in my opinion, except where the law forces it to.) Freedom of expression is a right, but freedom from offense in a public space isn't.

"No naked children or gore" is not at all reasonable, on a site with over a billion users, and a billion different use cases.

Thirteen year old kids and up though right?

In the U.S., a law called COPPA creates additional requirements for websites that interact with children under the age of 13. So, to avoid those complications, Facebook sets their ToS to 13 and up, like a lot of other sites.

Thus it seems unlikely that they can admit that there are a lot of under-13 kids on their service, without creating the chance that some enterprising fed will take a look at their COPPA compliance. This will hopefully have the side effect of reducing the value of "for the kids!!" arguments.

> It's a social network with kids on it.

That's not a good argument. You can apply filters only for accounts used by kids, and only in jurisdictions where it's required by law.

Why do they do more than what is required by law or opted-in by the user?

Facebook is a new source, maybe the news source, for many people. Sure, children could also be watching CNN, BBC or Fox News... Does that mean they should not report on the real world?

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